30 March 2015

Designer Shares Advice On How To Balance Personal Projects With Client Work

Matt Owens,, designer and co-founder of New York-based agency Athletics, has an interview with Fast Company where he shares useful advice on how he balances personal projects with client work.

The interview was conducted as part of Fast Company’s ‘Lunch Talks’ video series in partnership with Brooklyn design studio Hyperakt, where they chat with creatives about their work.

In the video, Owens reveals that the key to taking personal projects as seriously as commissioned work is to treat them like paid endeavors.

“You can’t treat them differently, or they become secondary or fall through the cracks. That’s really hard to do—you have to kind of abstract it in your mind and think of the self-initiated project as something that’s as important as a project that’s paying money. When you see it as a pet project that’s done after 5, it’s never as good as when you’re like, ‘We’re dedicating resources to it, we’re putting money behind it. This is a real thing.’ That’s the secret to it.”

Although the interview was recorded a year ago, we think the advice Owens offers will resonate with creatives everywhere, and deserves to be shared.